Fibre vs 5G

“Right now, the internet, with all our mobile devices is consuming about 10% of all the energy we produce as a species,” former British Telecom chief technology officer Peter Cochrane says.

He’s explaining why the so-called internet-of-things will be huge, 5G and other wireless technologies will never make fibre redundant (fibre, of course, being close to the heart of Chorus, which is hosting his New Zealand visit). …

Some say the nightmare scenario for Chorus is that just as the UFB fibre rollout wraps up at the end of 2019, Spark, Vodafone and 2degrees will be upgrading their mobile data networks to 5G, with bandwidth matching what most people get from a landline fibre connection today. The UFB will be finally complete, and suddenly surplus to requirements.

But the ex-BT CTO says there’s “not a chance” that will happen.

People who say that don’t understand the nature of wireless or the capabilities of fibre, he says. And nearly every pundit would agree with him, NBR would have to say – at least with data compression technology as it stands today. The bands of spectrum that suit mobile data transmission can only get so crowded and are subject to interference. But you always lay more fibre or upgrade its capacity.

You can get amazing speeds now on mobile, but fibre will always be able to be faster, with greater capacity and less latency.

How does New Zealand’s UFB rollout stand up internationally? Is it world-class, as our government says?

Mr Cochrane reckons so. He says it’s “ahead of the UK and every other country in Europe.”

peterwn

So did NZ: natural gas -> methanol -> synthetic petrol. The second stage at Motunui was relatively shortlived but AFAIK the first stage is still producing methanol (methyl alcohol – the poisonous alcohol).

cmm

hmmokrightitis

Correct – taking into account the Waitara valley site, the Motonui site is one of the largest, most efficient and cost effective (and all with green tech) producers of methanol in the world, delivery hundreds of $M into the local and NZ economy.

But thanks for asking jms, they are a great customer to have as well 😀

cmm

“Right now, the internet, with all our mobile devices is consuming about 10% of all the energy we produce as a species,” former British Telecom chief technology officer Peter Cochrane says.”

That is absolute rubbish.

Food is energy, as is coal used in furnaces to make steel as is wood chopped down in the third world to make cooking fires.

Heating one bath uses more energy than running a cellphone for 5 years. So assuming all the back-end infrastructure (Google, cell towers,…) use 100 times that, you’re still using more energy keeping clean than using your phone and all the internet stuff it is connected to.

Inandout

Chorus has got through most of its cable laying on a wing and a prayer, using indentured Indian ‘one week’s training’ workmen. Unless the client watches the fibre laying very carefully, botch ups are generally guaranteed.

peterwn

As cellular data needs increase the cells will get smaller and tighter. A challenge will be to minimise fringe interference. The more cells and more speech/data. the more backhaul capacity needed and this will be via fibre with some microwave. Dervers will be fibre connected – it does not make sense to run these via wireless. Even the Wairoa to Waikaremonana fibre link (called the link to nowhere by a MSM journo) will remain relevant and will probably be extended to Rotorua in due course.

Latency for games, yes, but the real killer advantage fibre has over wireless is upstream speeds.

As internet upstream speeds get up to and above 100 Mbps it becomes unnecessary for most people to maintain their own data storage and all kinds of digital assets, editors, document manipulation and work can be provided as services, including collating and administering the data being worked on.